One for the Money?
Written: Jan 30 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some interesting concepts at play.
Cons: Dead prose sets a bad precedent for a lackluster story.
The Bottom Line: Ellis may be reaching out to a new segment of fans but he risks running off those who have treasured his past work.
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| strictlypoison's Full Review: Bret Easton Ellis - Lunar Park Books |
Bret Easton Ellis has grown into a ramshackle processer of words. In his latest novel, Lunar Park, he makes a clear and stark abandonment of the very magic that made him such an interesting writer. Always on the cutting edge of literature, Ellis catapulted to fame with a novel he wrote during college (Less Than Zero), stepped it up a notch (in my mind, anyway) with his follow up Rules of Attraction, and then ensconced himself in a mire of controversy with the wildly depraved and sickening (yet incredibly absorbing and exciting) American Psycho. Later he would publish a short story collection (The Informers; a personal favorite of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk), and then the celebrity-as-terrorism thrill ride Glamorama. Throughout his varied career, he has proven himself a master at dialogue but weak at characterization. He's shown an amazing wit and imaginative mind while also showing a penchant for excess (particularly in the moral depravity of his stories).
Lunar Park starts with a brief recap of Ellis' life. Showered by fame as a young man, spending money like it would never end (he explains that no one could understand how he was going broke on $3 million a year), and then a sober shock to the system when, firstly, American Psycho erupted in cries of racism, misogyny, and all other shades of bigotry and exploitation of violence; this was quickly followed by the death of his father, a sad event that threw a light on a rather sizable debt he had put the family under. This is a remarkable study as Ellis is candid, self-deprecating, and enlightening. But here he diverges from reality into fantasy.
For a man that always pushed the line (Wall Street mogul as serial killer? Celebrities using their fame to hide terrorist organizations?), the rest of this book is a sadly cliched and uninspired offering. Perhaps Ellis began to fantasize about what a normal life for him could be like. It might be that simple. Unfortunately, there is no edge in that sort of navel-gazing.
We find Ellis in a loveless marriage, tied to a domestic routine, his best days of writing long past, his struggles with alcoholism and drug use still sabotaging what little life he has eked out for himself, and playing half-assed dad to disinterested children. It is an altogether logical idyllic reality that Ellis would imagine for himself. And then things become weird.
Ellis struggles through his relationships with both his wife and his eldest son before letting the whole thing devolve into a supernatural non-thriller that skirts logic more than entrances. He is being stalked by Patrick Bateman (American Psycho's eponymous narrator), apparently for real. The idea is not altogether that unique as you can look at Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions as almost a guide to some of this stuff (the narrator being the writer himself, entering his own story, making his characters move from the page to reality). Simultaneous to this, Ellis' house is slowly transforming into his childhood home while a rabid doll is terrorizing the young daughter.
I will say no more of the plot, suffice to say it is as uninspired as it sounds. Ellis is guilty of two paramount crimes in this novel. The first is that the story is not engaging. It has none of the biting sarcasm and dark humor his previous work has shown. It does not have the dizzying near-black satire of American Psycho or Glamorama. It is also not a competent character study as Rules of Attraction was. The essential point of the story, to me, was that even in his fantasy world, Ellis' cruel personality and tremendous baggage devours the perfection he desires in his fantasies.
The second crime is far bigger than the first. His prose is neutered, to be precise. Before this novel, I placed Ellis in the highest pantheon of my revered writers that includes Palahniuk (at least his early work), Denis Johnson, Amy Hemple, Irvine Welsh, Jay McInerney (who, as one of Ellis' oldest and closest friends actually shows up in this book), Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs, Jerry Stahl...well, I could keep going. The reason all of these writers fill my pantheon is that, in addition to telling interesting stories, were masters of minimalist prose. The words slice like a razor, the imagination runs free on the page under the strictest strokes of the pen (or keyboard). This novel, sadly, is a step away from that trait. I at one time considered Ellis one of the masters of minimalist writing, particularly for his works American Psycho and the story collection The Informers. He was almost without peer. His dialogue buzzed with mixed signals, double entendres, clever puns, penetrating insight, and (as with Don DeLillo's dialogue) a brilliant counterpontal duality of subjects. In other words, the characters often talk past each other.
By the end of the book, I was hoping someone would put Ellis out of his misery, both as a character in the book and as a writer of this kind of pap. Sure, he does make some interesting plot points that work well within the structure he's set up, but this is a novel reeking of desperation. I am firmly convinced he wrote this book for the money. Some would call this selling out, but as Martin Amis once responded to this charge, sometimes you have to write a book to fix your teeth. I think that is what Ellis has done here. He's written a somewhat conventional thriller to reacquire some of that filthy lucre. And yes, he is an adept artist so he was able to make it at least marginally interesting, though more in the abstract than the concrete. Reading the book is like sifting through any other beach read if you don't know the context of the novel.
Dead prose. Wooden characters. A meandering plot that tries to bend genres but only succeeds in bumping them against each other. The only elements of the book that I can really appreciate are the nebulous concepts Ellis suggests in terms of the paranormal. Not the evil spirit in the house (which is clearly Ellis' own sabotaging personality), but the idea of fiction becoming reality. And maybe that was Ellis' only artistic point in this novel: He introduced a fantasy only to tear it down because of his own hang ups. Even in his speculative fiction of the good life, Ellis poisons the environment until there is no good life left.
This is a mostly soulless novel and that, more than anything else, is an insult to the greatness of an author I consider a genius.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
strictlypoison
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Member: Josh Campbell
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
But you're not made whole by staying broken.
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